thoughts – Page 2 – Tony Ballantyne

Why Loving Unfashionable Art Can Lead to Success

I rather like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s work.

On the rare occasions I mention this most people feel the need to tell me they don’t like his music. There are two possible subtexts to their comments, either they’re telling me that I’m wrong in liking his stuff, or they’re telling me that they have better taste than I do.

Anyway, I recently read and enjoyed Unmasked, his autobiography. It gave me something to think about.

Near the beginning of the book, Lloyd Webber describes how he was always uncool. He liked musicals when they were out of fashion and, in particular, he liked Rogers and Hammerstein when the critics were slating their work. (I love Richard Rogers’ music even now). As a child, Lloyd Webber’s other interests were Victorian Art and Medieval architecture, both also desperately uncool at the time. At one point he describes the moment he first heard the Beatles and he realises that his street cred had just gone into negative.

Even so, he still loved musicals. You’ve got to really love something to keep pushing yourself on whilst everyone else is turning their nose up at what you’re doing. If you’re just doing something because you think it’s cool you’re never going to be more than half-hearted about it at best.

That thought led me to wonder if people who like unfashionable stuff are more likely to succeed. Not because what they like is unfashionable, but rather because the fact that it’s unfashionable doesn’t bother them.

I love SF and have done as far back as I remember. My mother was a fan, and she introduced me to Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, as well as Star Trek and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

I can’t say my friends ever laughed at me about it when I was a kid, but it wasn’t a popular topic of conversation back then. I was an SF fan long before I was a writer.

But I think I realised while reading his book that I’ve never loved SF as much as Lloyd Webber loves musicals.

He always loved musicals, he always wanted to write musicals and so he set out to do just that. True, he had the family and connections to help him succeed, but he was single minded in that pursuit.

Good for him.

P.S. The image attached to this post came from Pexels free photos. I searched for cool and stylish and that’s what came up. I don’t want the model thinking I’m calling them uncool. Far from it. That’s their thing. Let them do it.

And through the wire…

A few years ago I bought myself an expensive phone, a change from the cheap ones I’d always used until then.

I would have been delighted with it apart from one thing: it frequently failed to charge.

Searching online, I found lots of other people having the same issue. Naturally, there were lots of opinions on where the fault lay. The OS, the manufacturer, the fact people hadn’t updated their phone. But in the middle of all the complaints one message kept patiently popping up: it’s all down to a faulty bunch of cables. Replace the USB cable and everything will be fine. I tried everything else before taking this advice, and guess what…

I had a similar experience when I replaced my 12 year old PC. I was having trouble burning DVDs (don’t ask) and I thought that maybe I’d pushed the old hardware as far as it could go. I bought a new PC and everything was fine. Problem solved.

It wasn’t until someone asked for a kettle lead to plug into the PA at a gig I was playing. I lent them my old PC lead. We turned on the PA and heard nothing but crackling. It turned out that, like with the phone, it wasn’t the device that was faulty, but the lead.

I was reminded of this at recent writer’s group meeting when critting a story. The world building was excellent, the plotting tight, the characters interesting. But the story wasn’t working.

The trouble in this case wasn’t anything to do with the story itself, it was the sentences themselves. Reading the story out loud (an old trick) revealed just how convoluted they had become. The writer was so intent on delivering all the ideas they had developed they had lost sight of the actual words they were using.

Stories like this remind me of playing the cornet. As they say in brass bands, it doesn’t matter how great your technique is when you’re blowing on your instrument, if you’re not making a pleasant noise, no one wants to hear.

When things aren’t working, whether with machinery, or stories, or indeed life itself, we have a tendency to blame the big obvious things and to forget about all those other less glamorous mechanisms that keep things running. Quite often we lose sight of the really simple changes that can be made in order to improve things.

Have I mentioned going for a walk recently?

Should you start your novel with a fight?

Should you start your novel with a fight?

It’s a good idea in one sense. I read a lot of opening chapters by beginner writers (and to be fair, some very experienced ones) that are nothing more than pages and pages of world building. This is particularly true in Fantasy and SF where the world they are describing is unknown to the reader.

World building is great fun if you’re a writer, it’s deadly dull to the reader. There is no conflict, no action, no story in other words.

So yes, why not start with a fight? It gives you a chance to show off your writing chops, examining the emotions, building the tension, having the bad guys seem to be on the point of victory than the hero turns it around at the last minute and wins through…

Except it usually doesn’t work. To care about a fight, you’ve got to care for the people taking part, and if this is the start of the novel and you’ve only just met them, then you’re not emotionally invested in them yet. You don’t really care who wins.

It’s not so bad in a historical novel when you may have an inkling that you’re on the side of, for example, the Allies and not the Nazis, but what chance have you got in a Fantasy novel where the Alfari are fighting the Volana? (And why have you used those words for their names?)

Even worse, what if the bad guys aren’t bad guys at all, but animals? I’ve read a surprising number of stories which begin with the hero successfully fighting off an attack by wolves (or smeerps). I’m not sure that killing a lot of wolves establishes a character’s hero credentials. Wolves aren’t evil, they’re just doing their job. And all the hero has done is save their own skin. All I’ve learned from such a scene is that the hero is good with a sword. I’m reserving judgement on whether I have any sympathy with them.

If you’re dead set on having a fight at the opening, make sure you establish whose side we’re on. You could give clues of course. The opening of the original Star Wars film does this well. It uses visual clues to establish who the bad guys are: the really big bully spaceship chasing the little one, one side wearing masks and killing without mercy. Then there is the use of trigger words like Empire. Empires in these sorts of stories are nearly always evil. This works, but it’s difficult, and it goes to demonstrate the following point:

It’s really hard to start a novel. Your aim is to establish who is who, what they want and what’s stopping them. A fight may seem attractive, but it’s not the easy option.

How we used to write: Part one

Who remembers this?

(The featured image for this post is an old Interzone rejection letter.)

I’ve been clearing out my study following my retirement from teaching. Amongst my files I found all my old unsuccessful submissions from the late 80s and early 90s to magazines like Interzone, FEAR and BBR.

I lost count of how many submissions I made. At least 40, probably more like 50.

Things have changed a lot since then. Nowadays most submissions are electronic. Back then the finished manuscript had to be printed off (my first MSS were printed out at work as I didn’t have a printer) and placed in an envelop containing a stamped address envelope (or an international reply coupon if I was sending it abroad) for the reply. I used to mark my manuscripts as disposable, meaning I didn’t want them returned. I would print a new copy each time so that editors didn’t know they were third or fourth in line for a submission. I’m sure they would have guessed. Who doesn’t send to the highest paying markets first?

After the MS was posted, there was the wait for the reply. Weeks writing a story, weeks waiting for a reply, opening the envelope and then the bitter knife in the guts feeling of disappointment when the story was rejected.

For a couple of years all I got were standard rejections. I couldn’t understand why my stories weren’t selling. Reading over those old MSS the reason is obvious. The stories weren’t very good. There were some good ideas there, if I say so myself, but the actual story itself was lacking if not non existent. I couldn’t see that at the time, but that’s what I had to learn, and it’s something that I only learned by practicing. By writing and submitting, writing and submitting.

After a while I stopped getting standard rejections, I started to receive nearlys and almosts, and comments on how to make the stories better. (It’s worth noting that Interzone in those days nearly always provided constructive feedback). That was progress, but it was still bitterly disappointing. The longer the wait, the more likely it seemed the story had finally been chosen, but then the gate would squeak, I’d hear the snap of the letter box and I’d run down to see the envelope and open it and… all that hope crushed in a few seconds.

Things are very different nowadays. There have been occasions when I’ve submitted something online and received a rejection (or acceptance) sometimes the very next day. Rejection still hurts. There seems to be something very unequal about the investment in time and the suddenness of the “No, thank you.”.

But that’s the nature of the profession. Rejection, like it says in the letter, means the story isn’t suitable for the publication’s needs.

That’s it. The story isn’t suitable. I’m very grateful to the people over the years who’ve told me exactly why my story wasn’t suitable. I’d like to thank them here.

I listened!

AI Made me Redundant

Yesterday, a student asked me to help him with a program he was writing in his own time. It was an impressive project, but it wasn’t working properly.

I quickly spotted what the problem was, but finding exactly where the error lay in the code was a lot more difficult. This is typical in this sort of beginner project: there will be several hundred lines of badly laid out code as the student is still learning their craft.

After about half an hour I went to get a cup off coffee while I gave my mind a chance to reset. When I came back, the student said he’d found the problem. I congratulated him and asked him how he’d found it. He told me, and that’s when I realised I was now obsolete.

The student hadn’t, in fact, found the error himself. Rather he’d put the code into AI and got that to spot the mistake.

AI had just rendered me redundant. If I had a particular skill as a teacher of coding, it was in knowing what mistakes a student would typically make, the sort of mistakes that aren’t obvious to an experienced coder. A big part of teaching is knowing the misconceptions that students are going to have, and I’ve been teaching programming for nearly 30 years. I like to think few others have the same facility as I do for spotting those sort of mistakes.

Well, no more.

A lot of writers have posted about having their work ripped off by LLMs, me included. This is annoying, I know, and I’m as irritated as everyone else by this. Maybe not as irritated by those editors who are having to wade through a slew of AI generated stories, but still annoyed.

But annoyed as I am, I’ve yet to see a decent book created by AI. I like to think I still have some worth as writer.

But as a teacher, and not just a glorified childminder there’s now one less reason to pay my wages. It’s a sobering thought.

My first novels were about a benevolent AI. I hope this is the future I wrote about.

Great Man Theory

Thomas Carlyle stated that “The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

Most 19th Century composers said that Beethoven was a great man. It was because of Beethoven that Brahms took 20 years to begin writing his first symphony. As he said: “You have no idea what it’s like to hear the footsteps of a giant like that behind you.”

Most people nowadays would disagree with Great Man Theory. Contemporaries of Carlyle such as Herbert Spencer pointed out that supposed “great men” are merely products of their social environment:

Modern AIs would seem to agree with Spencer. There are no great humans. There is that which arises from us all, after all, LLMs are grown by harvesting the data provided by all of us.

I was rather ambivalent about AI in the past. But my opinion has hardened. AI may be inevitable, but we still have a choice.

All that art ever is, is a window into someone else’s soul. Sometimes we look through that window and we recognise ourselves. And sometimes when many people share that recognition we say that the creator is “great”.

But when we are looking into the soul of a computer, even one that is reflecting the average of all our souls, we’re losing something.

That’s why AI will always be shit. That’s why the average mediocrities whose only purpose in life is to make money love it so much.

And all AI is doing is dragging us all down to their level.

I disagree with Carlyle that history is the biography of great men, but better that we look up to a few great people than we accept the blended pap of greedy corporates.

We have a choice about which art we consume.

Future Proofing my Notes

As I mention last week, I’ve moved my notes to Obsidian. I’m going to talk about Obsidian another time, for the moment I want to talk about the notes themselves. Specifically, why I’ve converted all my notes to markdown.

A writer lives by their notes. Ideas; scenes; character sketches; dialogue; impressions, all carefully recorded and waiting to take on life someday in a story. I remember seeing Poul Anderson’s carefully typed list of story ideas in the science fiction museum in Seattle and feeling a warm glow of recognition. Not only that, but validation. I was doing this right.

I’ve got notes going back decades. Notes written in old exercise books, cheap reporter’s notebooks and expensive leather bound journals. I’ve experimented with devices such as Psion Organisers, Palm Pilots and even an iPod Touch.

The trouble with storing notes electronically used to be exporting them to a new device. Cross platform software like Evernote was a revelation as it meant you only needed to enter your notes once and then you could find them anywhere.

Evernote, Apple Notes, One Note and the like are fantastic. But what if you want to change to a new application? That’s where the problems arise.

The trouble is the way your notes look on the screen is not the same as the way your notes are stored on the computer.

Take this example

This is a Heading

Here’s some text
Here’s a link to my website

Here’s how Evernote stores the above

 <note>
    <title>This is a Heading</title>
    <created>20230727T080748Z</created>
    <updated>20230727T080830Z</updated>
    <note-attributes>
      <author>Tony Ballantyne</author>
    </note-attributes>
    <content>
      <![CDATA[<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE en-note SYSTEM "http://xml.evernote.com/pub/enml2.dtd"><en-note><ul><li><div><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">Here’s some text</span></div></li><li><div><a href="https://tonyballantyne.com" rev="en_rl_none"><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">Here’s a link to my website</span></a></div></li></ul><div><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="--en-markholder:true;"><br/></span></span></div></en-note>      ]]>
    </content>
  </note>

If you look carefully you can see the original text, along with metadata such as when the note was created, and formatting data such as the text colours. It’s hard to extract the relevant information from all that.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that Evernote is one of the good guys, they make it easy to export your data, they don’t go out of their way to obfuscate things and keep you in their system.

Here’s a better way of storing the above, this time using markdown.

# This is a Heading
- Here's some text
- [Here's a link to my website](https://tonyballantyne.com)

Looking at that you can understand why it would be sensible to store your notes in that format. It’s easy to read, it’s easy to transfer.

That’s why I’ve converted all my notes to markdown. They’re now stored on my devices, not in the cloud. I can invest the time in getting them just right without having to worry about having to convert them in the future.

So what about Obsidian? Obsidian has many fantastic features that I’ll talk about later, but the bottom line is that it functions as a markdown reader and editor.

In other words, if I decide I don’t like Obsidian in the future, I’ll simply choose another application that handles markdown.

Here’s what Stephan Ango, one of the guys behind Obsidian, has to say about this.

I am not an influencer

As the school holidays approach and I embark on my annual sorting of my notes and resources ready for the new school year, I’m going to take a moment to reflect on why I do this.

By this I mean maintaining three websites. That’s this blog, this site about my writing and this tech/education site. Sometimes the boundaries between the three blur which is why I’m in the process of migrating them across to Obsidian. I’ve started with my teaching notes (hence this post) and I’ll be moving on from there. Expect much more about that another time.

I began to blog about 15 years ago, principally to advertise my books, but it quickly became more than just that. After a couple of years I started my tech site. You can read why here: https://tech.tonyballantyne.com

But that’s not the full story.

I’ve written about blogging as way of getting started as a writer and way of maintaining enthusiasm as a writer, but that’s not the real reason why I blog.

I’m not an influencer. I don’t do product placements. I don’t charge for the resources on my sister sites. I don’t have adverts. I get a lot of requests from people asking if they can monetize my site and I always reply no. I don’t really do social media apart from for genuine social reasons: to keep in touch with old friends.

So why go to all this effort?

The reason why I write is because I enjoy writing. That’s why I’m a writer. And that’s why I do this. The reason why I wrote this post was because it made me happy. It also reminded my just how much I enjoy writing.

And now I’m going to make myself a cup of tea.

If you’re reading this in the northern hemisphere, have a good summer!

Pat Mills Iconoblast

I feel like I’ve spent too many posts recently talking about bad writing. It’s taken Pat Mills’ Iconoblast newsletter dropping into my mailbox to prompt me to comment on good writing instead.

As Wikipedia says, “Pat Mills is an English comics writer and editor who, along with John Wagner, revitalised British boys comics in the 1970s, and has remained a leading light in British comics ever since. He has been called “the godfather of British comics”.”

He’s certainly been a great influence on my writing. If you’ve not heard of him I’d recommend you take a look not just at Slaine, Charley’s War and Nemesis the Warlock, but his writing about writing. (paid links)

Pat Mills is a prolific writer both through natural talent and necessity (Comics don’t pay well).

Principally, he knows what makes a good story. Part of being a writer is developing a feel for this, and you do this by practicing your craft. But Mills has taken this much further. I remember the reader’s polls that used to appear in comics when I was a kid. I didn’t realise then how much the results of these polls shaped the stories that appeared. It’s fascinating and instructive to discover just how much Mills studied the feedback from these polls to tailor the stories to just what the readers wanted.

But rather than me telling you about this, take a look at his post on the stories in Girls Comics.

But what about your artistic vision? Surely it’s important to tell your own stories in your own way?

Well, that’s very true. As Charlie Parker said, learn the changes and then forget them. But you have to learn the changes first, and Pat Mills is a master.

The Minor Reharm

Reharmonization is a musical term for changing the chords in a song while keeping the melody the same.

Jazz musicians do this a lot. There’s also been recent fashion amongst young singers for slowing down fast songs and reharming them in a minor key. One example that sticks in my mind was a reharmed version of John Travolta and Olivia Newton John’s “You’re the One that I want.” The original song had the happy urgency of teenage longing. The new version, at least to my mind, sounded like an obsessive stalker sitting in his van late at night, waiting for his target to walk by.

The minor reharm can be a lazy way for a musician to pump a bit of emotion into a song. I think it’s a good way to describe the process by which writers invest their stories with fake emotion.

The minor reharm is often evident in TV series and box sets. You notice it when characters’ emotions are magnified to fill screen time. They argue and fall out for no reason other than to provide enough plot to take the episode to the break.

This is not only lazy writing, it’s not even accurate. People don’t fall out so easily in real life. When I was growing up in the ’70s, many of the sit coms revolved around farcical misunderstandings. Many of the TV series I give up watching nowadays depend on the same thing, except without the humour.

Of course, the minor reharm is not exclusive to the TV. You see it all the time in stories by authors who should know better. Rather than give examples it’s probably more instructive to refer to Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. Here the minor reharm that was the gothic novel is parodied to glorious effect.

If you’ve never read it, give it a try. You’ll be astonished how modern the tone feels.